What if you are not in the top 25% of your class but top 30?
@illini23 Your rank really only matters if you are auto-admission such as top 10%, otherwise your SAT, ACT, essays, etc will be more important for you. Especially if you are considering engineering, your SAT and ACT are very important.
Top 30% is 2nd quarter, so you are grouped with holistic review applicants. It is much harder to obtain full admission College Station campus - roughly 12% admission rate for that category. The admission process is (or was, since they can always change it): 50% rank & scores and 50% everything else on the application. Rank is a prominent factor in admissions here - top 10% TX students are admitted without consideration of scores, so it is highly valued.
As a benchmark, look to obtain scores that qualify as academic admit ( 1300 SAT - M+ CR, 30 ACT). A 30% is better than 49%… they do take note of your rank within the quartile. Offsetting one with the other is a good plan of attack if you don’t qualify for academic admit status (rank & scores).
Since you’re OOS, do know that applications here are due MUCH earlier. Many are submitted on the first day, traditionally August 1st. They recently moved up the deadlines for Engineering applicants only - this is new this year. All engineering applicants will be holistically reviewed to obtain admission to the engineering college AFTER gaining admission to the university. For you, that means two holistic reviews. Here’s the link http://engineering.tamu.edu/easa/areas/recruitment/admissions
Good luck!